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The Talking Hour
It was spring in Clearwater but that night was very cold. Fionn finished a meeting with Leviathan a little before midnight that had started as tactics and degenerated into drinking and amiably arguing and segued back into talking tactics, Leviathan’s mind never anything less than razor sharp throughout. He walked through the camp, well-organized and well-guarded now. Ivan and Modi were on sentry patrol duty tonight and Fionn wondered at that, how a few months ago the very idea of Modi standing guard would have been an impossibility. The prospect of his cold bed in the loft hit him harshly tonight, as it sometimes did. He’d slept alone in his bed most of his life but these last few months he’d become vulnerable to real loneliness at night. At night he remembered the blood on his hands and felt monstrous sometimes. At night he remembered the pain he’d caused, how he hurt those close to him like Jenny or those who had tried to get close to him like Annie, and he felt all the more alone for feeling like he deserved to be. This was what led him sometimes to go home with women he met in clubs on the Second Circle, or to show up at the door of one of those past lovers or perhaps the door of one of the Sisters of the Whip. To many he looked like a womanizer now but to most of these women he was a surprisingly intimate encounter, or a friend with the killer combination of irresistible charm and a broken heart. Tonight he didn’t feel like making a journey anywhere, to his loft or The Second Circle or elsewhere, he just didn’t want to sleep alone. He made his way to The Kennel, the name Eddie had once given the Amazons’ tent, commenting on their sometimes-animalistic qualities. The Amazons hadn’t taken offence, even though Eddie had been terribly embarrassed at the slip. The name had stuck, as a name given by a charismatic individual often will. Fionn walked a little heavier than normal, knowing the Amazons were less likely to be threatened by those footsteps than quiet and hard to detect ones. He opened the tent flap and found the four of them on their sides like four spoons in a drawer. A response to the cold night, they huddled together in the most efficient way to conserve warmth. Polydora lay on the far left, next was redheaded Phoebe, then fierce Lykopis, then stoic Valasca on the far right. He wasn’t surprised when they all turned their heads as he entered, even blind Polydora. Something had changed between Polydora and Fionn, something subtle but significant. Perhaps it was on the night that Fionn made her try the trampoline and she laughed like a girl for the first time since she was indeed a girl child, though Fionn suspected it was later: when a little while passed and she started to realize he would never mock that brief glimpse of vulnerability or try to take advantage of it. Even more than when she’d forced him to fight and defeat her and her Amazons as a trial, that had made her begin to treat him like a true comrade in arms. “You should be sleeping,” Polydora said drily, part laconic observation of him waking them and a less obvious part concern for him. At her words the other three Amazons nodded and shifted outwards slightly, creating a space between Phoebe and Lykopis for him to lay down. He undressed and put on some old sixties style track suit bottoms (Black with white piping, of course) and a Bowie t-shirt, clothes he’d taken to leaving in The Kennel. He slid between Phoebe and Lykopis, let out a low, very quiet breath of comfort when they closed ranks around him. He lay on his right side facing Phoebe, his arm draping over her waist while Lykopis settled behind him with her arm resting on his hip. He was quickly warm and though he never really needed sleep anymore he felt it coming on as he relaxed. The Kennel had a comforting smell, The Amazons were supernally healthy beings of great power and they kept a clean tent. Ancient Greek oils and scents, so light a human would barely detect them, had become familiar to him here. His eyes grew heavy and as he listened the breathing of the four Amazons become regular and slow one by one, he slowly drifted to sleep. “Fionn.” The word was spoken very softly, almost contradictory to the habitual slightly clipped, militaristic tone. “Mmm.” Fionn said sleepily, though most of his brain was already awake and racing: his senses reached out to the Raven which perched in a tree overlooking the camp, nothing was out of order. Fionn could hear no movement outside the tent. All was well for now. One of the many continual processes of his brain told him it was just after two am: the talking hour. “Are you awake?” The voice was Phoebe’s, the gentlest of the Amazons -though this was a relative thing when dealing with highly disciplined eternal soldiers- her back warm against his chest. “Mm, sure,” He murmured quietly, his mouth not more than a few inches from her ear. “What do you fear about going into Tartarus?” She asked the question in a soft almost-whisper but he couldn’t mistake the deliberation, the question had been with her for some time. An impulse told him to tell her as commander it wasn’t his place to fear but that he could listen to her fears. Another told him it was late at night, and in this quiet moment it was right and true to share with her rather than playing a role. “I fear losing one of you, or the rest of the squad. Or that my father will be dead when we arrive, murdered as a final gesture of hate.” He finished and he could sense Phoebe’s quiet, her damnable battlefield instincts of reading her opponent telling her he hadn’t said it all. He thought she would press for more but instead she spoke herself. “Many years ago Polydora led us in battle against sisters of ours who had turned to serve a rich mortal, a man without principle, a man of great evil. He had taken an island for himself, our sisters killing the king and his troops to install him upon the throne. They had done terrible things in his name, Fionn.” Phoebe’s voice was soft and full of hurt, stored up for a very long time. He knew the hurt wasn’t all of it though. The pause grew longer so he laid his hand gently on her abdomen, felt her lace her fingers over his as she spoke again. “We killed them all. There were twenty of them but we were the greatest of the Amazons. We lost Daphne -I know, named like your friend of the noble Deadbeats- and she rests in the Elysian Fields now. We mourned her loss but celebrated her bravery. “The battle was long ago, but we know where warriors who turn to evil but yet believe in the traditions of Olympus go. Our sisters await us in Tartarus, Fionn.” Her voice didn’t crack at the end, the Amazons were so disciplined that was not surprising. Fionn could hear the pain and apprehension in her just the same though. With a gentle squeeze he pulled her back more tightly against him, offering some slight physical comfort while he couldn’t think of something to say to that. He feared she would feel foolish in the morning for revealing so much, so he spoke finally. “We will face Tartarus and all it holds together. You and your sisters, me, the squad, we’ll draw strength from each other for what we face.” He felt the words made sense but they weren’t enough so he continued. “I fear that my father isn’t the man I’ve dreamt up. I fear that the battle will end and I will free him but he will be a man I don’t warm to. I fear he will be just a man like any other father, and disappoint me.” His voice was low with shame as he spoke, and he felt Lykopis’s hand slide across him to rest at the centre of his chest, her body pressing more tightly against his back. He wondered when she’d woken but found he didn’t mind that she’d heard. “Daphne turned aside the spear of Helia, what would have been a killing blow,” Lykopis said very softly. Fionn was surprised at the gentleness of her tone, Lykopis had a fierceness of bearing more habitually severe even than that of Polydora their leader. “I had loved Helia as my sister, always knowing she was my equal or better with a spear. On the day of the battle I prayed to Artemis to give me strength and Apollo to let the sun always shine at my back, but once I engaged with Helia I knew she would kill me. There was no sisterhood in her eyes as we fought, but worst of all Helia always smiled in battle as some do, lips drawn back in a mixture of challenge and instinct. Her smile was no different as she raised her spear to kill me than it had been when we turned back the charge of the Cretans when we were little more than girls. In the final moment Daphne was there, deflecting the thrust and leaving an opening so that I killed Helia with my Xiphos. But Daphne is gone now.” This was by far the longest Fionn had ever heard Lykopis speak, he was a little taken aback at first but he found her candour comforting. He suspected she would not have spoken had he not made his own fears and hurts so naked in front of them. He didn’t want to speechify, didn’t want to speak any platitudes to them, so he struggled for something further to say. He realized even as he struggled that he felt very far from alone in this moment, felt a wave of gratitude to them so powerful it caught his breath in his chest. Polydora’s rough voice was quiet in the late night air. “We are the best of the Amazons. Lykopis, you’re stronger now than ever, and even Helia the champion of the rogue sisters couldn’t defeat you now without burying her spear in your back. And if she tried, she’d have to get through me. And Phoebe and Valasca. And Fionn.” With those last two words Polydora had settled a calm over the five bodies in the tent. Fionn breathed deep, Phoebe’s hair smelled clean and vaguely of something with oranges and the air in the tent was a little warmer now with five bodies rather than four. When Valasca spoke he was no longer surprised that she was awake too. “Fionn,” she said softly, her voice still slightly blurred with sleep, “At the Bacchanalia of your School a young woman who said she was named Cat told me that I and Phoebe and Lykopis and Polydora were very patient, to put up with the objectification of being dressed like the Sisters of Robert Palmer.” Fionn found himself smiling, imagining Kat - or ‘Cat’ - telling this to the mighty, stoic Valasca over some spiked punch at the Purity Dance on Valentine’s night. “I told her -gently- that she had courage in her heart but was desperately stupid to teach feminism to one of the Amazons, who submit to nothing they do not deem fit. I believe, however, that she thought I spoke in metaphor.” Fionn couldn’t help but chuckle a little at that, even the other Amazons laughed, but so very softly as not to wake the rest of the camp. Back to Stories Of The Metalverse